I really need your help in solving a problem! Apparently, my knowledge is not sufficient to find a solution. So, I have some msg files that I have already created and saved. Now I need to write a function that can help me create pdfs from msg files (there will be many of them). I'd be very grateful for your help!
Posting the solution which worked for me (as asked by Amey P Naik). As mentioned I tried multiple modules but only extract_msg worked for the case in hand. I created two functions for importing the outlook message text and attachments as a Pandas DataFrame, first function would create one folder each for the email message and second would import the data from message to dataframe. Attachments need to be processed separately using for loop on the sub-directories in the parent directory. Below are the two functions I created with comments:
# 1). Import the required modules and setup working directory
import extract_msg
import os
import pandas as pd
direct = os.getcwd() # directory object to be passed to the function for accessing emails, this is where you will store all .msg files
ext = '.msg' #type of files in the folder to be read
# 2). Create separate folder by email name and extract data
def content_extraction(directory,extension):
for mail in os.listdir(directory):
try:
if mail.endswith(extension):
msg = extract_msg.Message(mail) #This will create a local 'msg' object for each email in direcory
msg.save() #This will create a separate folder for each email inside the parent folder and save a text file with email body content, also it will download all attachments inside this folder.
except(UnicodeEncodeError,AttributeError,TypeError) as e:
pass # Using this as some emails are not processed due to different formats like, emails sent by mobile.
content_extraction(direct,ext)
#3).Import the data to Python DataFrame using the extract_msg module
#note this will not import data from the sub-folders inside the parent directory
#rather it will extract the information from .msg files, you can use a loop instead
#to directly import data from the files saved on sub-folders.
def DataImporter(directory, extension):
my_list = []
for i in os.listdir(direct):
try:
if i.endswith(ext):
msg = extract_msg.Message(i)
my_list.append([msg.filename,msg.sender,msg.to, msg.date, msg.subject, msg.body, msg.message_id]) #These are in-built features of '**extract_msg.Message**' class
global df
df = pd.DataFrame(my_list, columns = ['File Name','From','To','Date','Subject','MailBody Text','Message ID'])
print(df.shape[0],' rows imported')
except(UnicodeEncodeError,AttributeError,TypeError) as e:
pass
DataImporter(direct,ext)
Post running these 2 functions, you will have almost all information inside a Pandas DataFrame, which you can use as per your need. If you also need to extract content from attachments, you need to create a loop for all sub-directories inside the parent directory to read the attachment files as per their format, like in my case the formats were .pdf,.jpg,.png,.csv etc. Getting data from these format will require different techniques like for getting data from pdf you will need Pytesseract OCR module.
If you find an easier way to extract content from attachments, please post your solution here for future reference, if you have any questions, please comment. Also if there is any scope of improvement in the above code, please feel free to highlight.